Category: livecoding

Too long; didn’t read? Basically, please buy me a coffee or so by pressing this button:

I’ve been doing a lot of work on TidalCycles lately. Tidal is very much a labour of love, I’ve put a lot into it over the past decade, motivated by the fun of making music with it and of enjoying what other people are doing with it. That’s not sustainable though, so I’ve been looking for ways of asking some money in return.

I’ve looked at patreon.com, but it doesn’t sit well with me. It seems high maintenance, and doesn’t fit with my motivation to work on Tidal for the fun of it, and not turn it into ‘content’ to be delivered..

I’ve also looked at liberapay, and used it to raise money for server costs. This has actually been really successful, I raised nearly €500 which covered server costs for we.lurk.org, post.lurk.org, talk.lurk.org, algorave.com, toplap.org etc for a while (thanks!). This also made me feel much better at helping keep these things going, that people are up for chipping in some hard earned cash. That money has probably run out by now, there’s a few of us running these services and we’ll look into being a bit more organised about accepting donations.

Liberapay doesn’t feel right for tidal development either, though. It’s based on an anonymous donation model, which is great for some things, but there’s no way of directly thanking people who donate (if you’re one of them, really, thanks!).. Or doing any community building around it.

I’ve also tried crowdfunding. This has been a great experience, I met my funding ‘goal’.. But in truth, crowdfunding is more a way to get people involved in a project than fundraising.. I’ll likely end up in the red overall. Plus I’ve found it really hard to get as far as finishing the project.. People have been outstandingly patient, but it’s been a very long haul (two years late!!). I will get there, though.

Anyway, now I’m looking at ko-fi. This seems to fit much better. No stress for ‘creators’ or ‘supporters’ to detract from actually making stuff. One-off or regular payments, that go straight to me (no extra platform fees). Plus a nice coffee metaphor.. It’s going to take a lot of coffees to get Tidal 1.0 done so I’d really appreciate your support!

One last thing – one reliable way to fund tidal dev that I’ve found is by running workshops. If you’d like to host a one or two-day TidalCycles workshop next year, please get in touch! There’ll a lot of new stuff to learn + share.. Same goes for talks and performances, of course.

Also get in touch if you have ideas for other ways to make tidal happen..

I wrote a paper with Ellen Harlizius-Klück and Dave Griffiths called “Digital Art: A Long History“, accepted to Live Interfaces (ICLI) 2018. From the abstract: “A digital representation is one based on countable, discrete values, but definitions of Digital Art do not always take account of this. We examine the nature of digital and analogue representations, and draw from a rich pre-industrial and ancient history of their presence in the arts, with emphasis on textile weaves. We reflect on how this approach opens up a long, rich history, arguing that our understanding of digital art should be based on discrete pattern, rather than technological fashion.” You can read the pre-print here.

I’ll also be performing with my new Feedforward editor in ICLI, here’s a recent performance with it in Reykjavik:

I actually started ICLI in Leeds back in 2012 with Kia Ng, and I’m super excited to be attending the fourth biannual edition of the conference, especially as it has such a solid programme.

We’re still making the final programme and searching for additional funds, but it looks like we will have events in Sheffield and Leeds between 30th August and 4th September, and in Tokyo and Osaka between 8th and 18th November, including micro residencies, workshops, concerts and algoraves.

The funding will help support artists traveling between Tokyo and Yorkshire. From the Tokyo side we have:

Hope you can join us if you’re nearby Sheffield/Leeds or Tokyo/Osaka! We’ll share more details on the events soon. As a special preview Renick will join us in Sheffield for a performance this very Saturday..

Back in the glory days of slub I used to live code with Perl, and wrote a text editor (also in Perl) for it called ‘feedback.pl’. It was a strange thing, where you wrote self-modifying code to store data in the sourcecode for the music you were writing, and therefore visualise it. I’ve been intending to make something similar for tidal for ages, and took some time to finally start work. I’ve experimented with a weird visual editor for tidal before, and have been fiddling around with a web-based editor as well, but this time decided to write something that worked in the terminal, using the fantastic ncurses framework. This is partly so it’ll run nicely on the Pi Zero, for my ongoing Spicule project, but partly because it just makes sense for a text editor to work in text mode, and it’s good to start from basics without taking on the many assumptions of an existing ‘general purpose’ text editor. I’m just seeing where it takes me but I’m pretty happy with it so far, it has some structured editing around patterns already, some ascii VU meters going on, and every edit is automatically recorded + timestamped. It’s far from being in a usable state, but here’s a quick demo:

You can find it on github but I’m not inviting patches until it’s a bit more fully formed.

1. Happy to be introducing live coding to the Off Me Nut records halloween special, a proper Sheffield warehouse party on 27th Oct 2017. They made me this months “five star spooky recommendation”, putting the pressure on..

2. I had a great time playing the Haptic Somatic night at Unsound Archives festival, and the following morning was interviewed by Elsa Ferreira for the french edition of Vice’s Noisey. You can read the results here if you know French, or otherwise enjoy the google translation.

3. Lastly, had fun times in a live code duet with Joanne at the No Bounds Algorave last weekend, here’s the video:

AlgoMech – the festival of Algorithmic and Mechanical Movement is back for its second year. At one point I had strong doubts about doing a second edition of the festival (would it be AlgoMeh?) but it’s come together into something that I’m really excited about.

It will have an exhibition, with a nice mixture of machinery, textiles, projections and software art. Putting an exhibition together is way out of my comfort zone but with the artists involved I’m not worried. There’ll also be Open Platform performance art event within the exhibition, always revelatory events with performances about technology, but without technology. More to be announced, including work from Ellen Harlizius-Klück and FoAM Kernow.

The least likely performances will be from two bands bridging the divide between guitar+drums and techno. Amazingly 65daysofstatic (a band from South Yorkshire who want you to be happy) are going to headline, performing brand new work Decomposition Theory, three times. It’s unclear what they’re up to but it looks like it’s going to involve algorithms and maybe live coding (they’ve been known to dabble with gibber and also Tidal already).

Two of the 65dos shows will have the strongest support I could imagine in this context – aggrobeat band Blood Sport teaming up with live coder Heavy Lifting aka Lucy Cheesman. Blood Sport already make a kind of repetitive post-punk techno, with Lucy involved (as Heavy Bleeding) it’s going to be intense.

Then there’ll be the Algorave. It shows how far this scene has come that last year there were 12 top notch acts, and that they’ll be around the same again this year (more TBA) without repeats. Graham Dunning’s mechanical techno went down really well last year, so I’ve mixed in some more mechanisms this year. Firstly Faubel and Schreiber making minimal techno-generating robots, projected using an overhead projector. Also goto80 + Remin, where goto80 will do live tracking on a commodore 64, and Remin will provide a robotic hand, typing music on a commodore 64. The live coders I’ve booked have been doing amazing stuff lately. If last year is anything to go by, this is going to go off.. As a resident I’m happy to be collaborating with Dave Griffiths and Alexandra Cardenas as Slub as well..

A really nice symposium line-up is starting to emerge too, but that won’t be announced for a few days. Plus some hands-on workshops. .. and probably some more to come..

Anyway my hope is that by bringing these human artists together, working with algorithms and mechanisms, we’ll have the opportunity to really feel the connections between physical and abstract systems, and get a richer, longer (into the past and future) + human-centric view of what technology can be.

I had a great chat with Jack Chuter of ATTN:Magazine aired on Resonance Extra a couple of days ago. The associated tracklist is here and the archive is on mixcloud, the interview starts about 45 mins in:

Had a great time at No Bounds festival yesterday, mostly succeeded in pushing through post-election tiredness although think it shows a little bit in the radio piece I recorded there.. A ‘3 minute epiphany‘ on Mary Anne Hobbs’s (extremely good) Radio 6 show.. Listen here